Vision Cards

Tools for reflection and decision-making.

This was a 3-week project along with Edwin Cho & Krystal Tung for CMU's Spring 2019 Prototyping Studio. My role included conceptual, interaction, and visual design.

Our brief was fairly open-ended: Develop a concept, create a prototype, and use two rounds of A/B testing to iterate.

Tools used: Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Figma

The Outcome

A deck of 52 cards with words and imagery to guide self-reflection, a journal guide, and a companion mobile app.

Concept Development

Before starting the project, we had a loose idea about creating a tool for reflection.

We wanted to support a more open-ended contemplation process to help people better understand and conceptualize the challenges they face in their daily lives. With this in mind, we landed on this guiding question:

How might we provide a more open-ended process for reflection?

Inspiration: Elisabeth on Earth, Wild Ducks Playing Cards, Think Clearly Cards, Triggers Cards, Holstee Reflection Cards, and Cosmic Cards.

We all gravitated towards a card deck. To help us begin, we took a look at a number of different reflective card decks to guide our development and ideation process. We landed on a style that we liked — eclectic.

We wanted a card deck that blended a few distinct visual styles, as we would individually be creating the artwork. Our theme would be words in different languages with no English equivalent that describe emotions and feelings. We felt that this would allow for more diverse interpretation and processing.

Prototyping

We selected ~60 words from various languages and decided to develop imagery that we felt symbolized these words. Going along with our eclectic card deck style, each of us developed our own artwork/imagery for a selection of 20 words.

v1 card front and backs

We also wanted to create a guided worksheet that would guide card use.

v1 guided reflection journal

With our first round of testing in mind, we created 2 different versions of our card deck and 2 different versions of our worksheet.

Testing

We began by testing with 10 people. We wanted this round of testing to be fairly open-ended, hoping to get a general sense of how people might use the card deck.

We had two key insights from this round of testing:

01 Separate words and imagery: A number of testers felt a disconnect between the image and word.

02 Users like the 3-card guided worksheet: people felt that the worksheet provided better guidance in helping them find insights into their stressors.

In preparation for our second round of A/B testing, we iterated our card deck based on feedback. We separated words and imagery, created a few different versions of a card backing, and developed two different guided journals.

v2 worksheets - 2 versions for testing

card back explorations for testing

Final Product

Our final deck contains 52 images and word cards. To convey qualities of mysticism and spirituality, we decided to use a deep purple color for our card backs. We also included a 3-card guided reflection journal and instructions with the deck.

imagery cards

word cards

We also included a mobile app for users on the go.

app home and card search

journal entry using digital and physical cards